“I
think it’s time for all of us within civil society to think about how
we want to respond, autonomously and collectively, without waiting to
be saved by the same reactionary governments and corporations that have
produced the crises in the first place.” — scott crow, Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense.

There are as many guns in the US in private hands as the population — an estimated 300 million guns. Seventy-four percent of gun owners are male, 82 percent are white, and 61 percent of adults who own guns are white men, with white men making up 32 percent of the US adult population. Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has pointed out that the top reason for gun ownership is for protection, asking, “What are white men so afraid of?”

Gun control is as old as the US, according to Adam Winkler, author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America.
After the Revolutionary War, the framers of the US Constitution
determined “untrustworthy” people — such as African Americans,
Catholics and Loyalists — weren’t allowed to carry guns. During
Reconstruction, the KKK also acted as a disarmament group targeting,
terrorizing and murdering African Americans who owned guns, many of
whom were Union veterans. Even in the “Wild West,” it was against the
law to carry firearms into notorious towns such as Dodge City.

Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense, edited
by scott crow, digs into liberatory community armed self-defense
strategies, weaving together theory, history and practice. crow himself
has engaged in temporary community armed self-defense against racist
white militias who bragged about killing African Americans to the Danish press after Hurricane Katrina. Undoubtedly, crow’s own firsthand experience — detailed in his book Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective — has shaped his curation of the anthology.

Setting Sights flips
the gun-control debate on its head, citing that even Martin Luther
King Jr. had armed guards at times. The book also questions state
violence; opens discussions on disarming police; analyzes gun laws,
race and how to decentralize power; and diagnoses the macho-patriarchal ideology often associated and romanticized in gun culture.

Reminiscent of works such as Akinyele Omowale Umoja’s We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (2013), Nicholas Johnson’s Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms (2014), and Timothy B. Tyson’s Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (1999), the long history of self-defense by communities of color is comprehensively detailed in Setting Sights.
In the chapter titled “Self-Respect, Self-Defense, and
Self-Determination: A Presentation,” Black civil rights activists
Kathleen Cleaver and Mabel Williams converse about the Black Panther
Party, and Williams discusses her life with Black civil rights activist
Robert F. Williams, and how they started a rifle club to combat the Ku
Klux Klan in Monroe, North Carolina.

Like Robert F. Williams,
Dennis Banks was a military veteran and co-founded the American Indian
Movement (AIM) in 1968, taking up arms in self-defense at Wounded Knee
in 1973. In his piece in Setting Sights, titled “We Refuse to
Die: An Interview with Dennis Banks,” Banks explains that women were
armed at Wounded Knee and that AIM’s tactic of being armed strengthened
their positions when negotiating at Wounded Knee.

On the
discussion of gun control, author Neal Shirley points out that white
supremacy pervades the right-wing as well as liberal perspective of the
debate. Shirley explains that many right-wingers are “notoriously
racist” and National Rifle Association (NRA) literature often promotes
“fear of people of color,” with NRA pamphlets hinting at an impending
“race war to come.” Looking at the liberal perspective, Shirley notes,
“white liberals use gun control to legislate the freedoms of communities
of color,” which “give racist cops one more thing with which to
harass, detain, arrest, and brutalize people of color.”

Other histories of armed resistance covered in Setting Sights involve
the role of anarchists in the Russian Civil War between 1917-1922 by
Paul Avrich and anarcho-syndicalist militias in Germany from 1929-1933
by Helge Döhring and Gabriel Kuhn. In Russia, anarchists found
themselves at odds with the Bolshevik Red Army as well as the
anti-Bolshevik White Army, while the German anarcho-syndicalist group
Schwarze Scharen (roughly meaning “Black Droves”) continually “engaged
with Nazis in street fights and provided security at meetings and
events.”

The chapter titled, “The People Armed: Women in the
1930s Spanish Revolution” explains the role of Spanish anarchist women
from the organization Mujeres Libres (Free Women). Nikki Craft’s
chapter, titled, “Drifting from the Mainstream: A Chronicle of Early
Anti-rape Organizing and WASP” explains that in the 1970s, there was a
split from the group Dallas Women Against Rape, which formed Women
Armed for Self-Protection (WASP). Craft reveals that WASP routinely
held shooting practice for women, made leaflets, supported women “who
had killed rapists in self-defense” and helped to get media attention
to rape trials.

In Setting Sights, editor scott crow poses tough questions on the philosophy of liberatory community armed self-defense, such as: When
is armed engagement appropriate? How would we want it to look? How do
we create cultures of tacit or direct support and include people who
would never themselves engage in armed defense? How will we keep from
centralizing power? When do the consequences outweigh the benefits? As
students raise the issue of gun control in mass protests across the
US, it is worth considering the lessons learned from history and the
questions posed in Setting Sights. Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

Chris Steele co-authored an article with Noam Chomsky that was published in the latter’s book Occupy: Reflections on Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity.